of man in whom women choose to confide, but Hattie seems determined tonight to go over the top. He sits back, and decides to let her roll over him. Tomorrow he will have vanished. What does it matter?
The abuse continues, as Stephen, Hattie and Molly settle down to a little picnic of not-quite-defrosted potted shrimps, rubbery smoked chicken, random salad and unripe Camembert, washed down by gin and water. The conversation becomes more and more louche. The setting invites it. Molly’s flat has the air of a crumpled love nest. It is all bijoux and trinkets and tapestry cushions and French furniture. The plates are French china, chipped, pretty, non-matching. The glasses are dusty. Molly no longer sees as well as she did, but is too vain to wear spectacles. She is a handsome woman, with deep sharp blue eyes, and a delicate skin, and soft grey pompadour hair swept back into a coil tied with a blue velvet ribbon. Stephen had always admired her looks, but, as the evening wears on and the tone sinks yet further, he begins to see her as dyed and raddled, farded with the pink and the white and the blue. She is wearing rustling silver. Picture her, in her blue and silver, an English rose, dried and dyed and perfumed. Picture Hattie Osborne, a striking huge-eyed painted forty-year-old with a great headful of snaky falsely frizzed Medusa curls, and a long gold dress with a plunge neckline revealing glimpses of a naked bosom. Picture Stephen Cox, polite in his everlasting white suit. He sits neatly between them like a mascot, like a eunuch, as they tear to pieces the men that they have known. Bedecked and bedizened with jewels, they screech with tongues and talons.
Impotencies, meannesses, cowardices, treacheries, bad manners in and out of bed, all are hymned, bemoaned, indicted. Offences twenty years old are held up to the light, shaken, and savaged. Stephen thinks, this is the kind of dreadful conversation I quite enjoy, but it is going too far. The lipstick, the mascara, the oh so saddening march of merciless age upon them all, there, then, even then, as they sat there eating their salmonella-charged cold platter of treats from the delicatessen. ‘Pour réparer des ans l’irréparable outrage.’ The line from Athalie goes through and through his head. Jezebel, with her borrowed glory. They are all worn and used, they are on their way to the danse macabre, the leper’s ball, the bitter end. Hattie, frenzied, recoils in fear from her mirror image in Molly’s eye, and plunges on recklessly like a mad horse. It is of sex they sing, of the wrongs and pains of sex, and of its disappointments. Mad women, demented women, voracious, demanding, insatiable women.
‘Buggery may, of course, be the answer,’ says Molly, dabbing daintily at her lips, staining her old-fashioned damask napkin with deep sticky pink. ‘For satisfaction. After a certain age. Have you ever been buggered, Stephen? No? Have you, Hattie? I never have, and it’s too late now, I suppose. Is it the fashion, these days? One seems to read a lot about it. It wasn’t done, when I was young. Is buggery in, Stephen?’
She looks at him, demanding a response, but he is unable to answer, for the invitation in her eyes is too alarming. But Hattie careers on, unstoppable, taking this fence in her stride, the bit between her teeth.
‘But of course!’ she cries. ‘Of course! Many, many times! Orlando always preferred it! But then that was because he had such a tiny prick. And he wasn’t much good at buggery either!’
In vino veritas. She spoke the simple truth. And as she spoke, she suddenly unzipped the back of her gold dress, and let it fall forward from the waist over her turquoise-rimmed gold-plate and debris of cheese and biscuits. She sat there, topless, her excellent firm breasts eloquent over the Camembert. Stephen and Molly stared at them. Molly’s eyes filled with tears.
‘Yes,’ said Hattie, in a high-rhetorical trance, gazing into space like a priestess. ‘Yes, buggered, poked, screwed, raped, you name it, I’ve had it, and was it ever, ever enough, any of it? No, it was not,’ said Hattie. ‘It was never enough. It will never be enough. Never!’
Defiance blared from her nostrils, and she was breathing quickly and noisily, as though she had been running or violently making love. Her face was flushed with passion. She looked wonderful. She looked appalling. Stephen was frightened out of his wits. At any moment a breeze might blow upon her and she would turn grey and fall apart and crumble into ash before his eyes. This too too solid, this too too vibrant flesh would melt. Molly had already melted. Hattie hung on there, panting. Molly Lansdowne blew her nose, firmly, on a lace-edged handkerchief plucked from her own bosom, took another gulp of gin and water, reassembled her features, and heroically took charge.
‘There, there, my dear,’ she said, in her droll social voice. ‘You’d better fasten yourself up again, Hattie darling. You can’t go to Marjorie’s looking like that.’ She paused, and gallantly added, ‘Unfortunately.’
Hattie smiled, and descended from her height, and struggled back into her gold. Stephen helped to zip her up. The smooth skin of her womanly back tingled beneath his fingers. She was charged with electricity. She had a dark mole on her left shoulder. She was still dangerous, but for the moment docile. And off they had all gone, to Marjorie Kinsman’s birthday party, where there had been more drinking, more talking, more excited provocations. He had lost Hattie in the Circean throng of toads and pigs and monkeys and foxes. She had been sucked into the revelry, but he remained conscious of her presence throughout the long evening, catching her voice, her laugh, from beyond the alcove, from the tiny terrace, from the drawing room upstairs. He had made no commitment to depart with her, and she was accustomed to getting herself back from parties, but nevertheless she continued to beam towards him through the chatter and cigarette smoke and smouldering of idle passions, and at about half past one in the morning, as he was thinking he really must leave, as he hovered in the hallway trying to detach himself from Selina Mountjoy and Bruce Gibbon, he heard her cry out from the stairway. She cried out, but not to him. She cried to the world. ‘Oh shit,’ she cried, as she fell forwards, tripping over the hem of her long gold gown, caught by the ready arm of squat little Ivan Warner, always at hand whenever disaster struck. And Stephen had known that he could not leave her there, to be torn to pieces by her enemies, and he had gone to the rescue in his white suit, and for the second time that night she put herself together again, and they had made their farewells together and staggered out on to the cool pavement beneath a racing moon to look for a taxi. She took her shoes off and stood barefoot as they waited. ‘You’d better come back with me,’ said Stephen, who never said such things, as he gave the driver the address of his one-room flat on Primrose Hill. She held on to his hand in the taxi, and rocked and swayed. He made her coffee when they arrived, and she turned suddenly ice sober, and sat there calmly as though a storm had passed. ‘You’re a good friend, Stephen,’ she said. ‘You’re a pal.’ And they had cuddled together in the narrow bed, and whispered of little things. They recalled their first meeting, a hundred years ago, in a dubbing studio off Wardour Street, and a party at the Round House, and the time when Hattie had in her turn rescued Stephen from the clutches of a voracious bejewelled Italian journalist. They spoke of the moment when they had become friends. Hattie, observing Stephen romantically lunching alone in a self-service Italian restaurant near the British Museum, and struggling incompetently with a plate of spaghetti and some galley proofs, had boldly advanced upon him and his table with her tray, and sat herself down, and offered him a glass of wine from her carafe. He had not resisted. The proofs had snaked all over the floor, and Hattie, rescuing them, had offered her services as personal organizer. They had laughed a lot, over that, and over the years.
There was no way they could ever make love to one another, these two. They were saved from that. They had remained good friends.
And that was how Harriet Osborne came to take possession of Stephen Cox’s apartment. In the small of the night they arranged it, and, both being mad, in the morning they kept their bargain. ‘We mad people should stick to our agreements,’ said Stephen, as Hattie thanked him in the green dawn. And off he flew to Bangkok, and vanished from her sight.
It is not surprising that Hattie looks back on this night with horror. She cannot remember all of it, but she remembers enough to know that she behaved atrociously, even for her. But
